cat

By bazza104 at 2012-05-30

Bazza

Nice cat, Bazza..do wish the eyes were a bit lighter...I would love to get as good a photo though...Shirley

Thank you. As for the eyes I have to be true to what the animal has and not try and make out its something different.

Bazza

I am sorry I didn't explain myself better...I just wished the shadow was not so dark on the eye region of the face...Is it a Snow Leopard? I do like the picture a lot. And I do have trouble seeing dark areas. Shirley

SM the following is not meant to offend just what I believe may be the problem with what you are seeing.


Maybe its your monitor or computer, its ok on my Dell IPS monitor. One of the big problems I have come across is not having the right monitor to view and edit photos, as well as a good graphics card in a computer. I have mentioned before I am now having to go through thousands of photos correcting what I once thought looked ok. A huge task so doing it bit and eventually hopefully getting them correct.

The graphics card I chose was a 1Gb MSI GTX560TI OC Twin frozen1140nm,4200MHz GDDR5,GPU880MHZ Shader 170MHz 384 core and the Dell monitor around the same price.

I wanted to get the best I could afford, so the above together with the purpose built computer for photographic work you wouldn't be able to buy off the shelf as each item was researched and hand picked, but if you could you would be expecting to pay for parts around $2000 (£1500) or more before the actual build costs.

Now you might well say was it worth the expense? so lets put it this way, having now got the right equipment it makes my old Samsung monitors and cheaper computers make pictures look rubbish.
I honestly didn't realise what a difference this new gear has made. So I fell head first into the same mistake.

There is a possibility that people spend a lot of money on photographic gear,ie camera and lenses, and the equipment to view the photos is overlooked. Bit like buying an expensive car and putting in cheap poor quality fuel, you won't get the best out of the car. Same with photography, expensive cameras and poor quality computer/monitor.

Its a lesson I have learn't after many many years of taking photos.

I am not saying this is true in your case, but thought it worth mentioning as you say the eyes area looks a little dark even though they don't have direct sunlight on that area of the face. Oh the picture was taken through glass just to get the record straight.

Bazza

Lovely capture Bazza, looks like you had some tricky harsh sun light to deal with (couple of slight blown areas), but a fantastic portrait non the less.

Thanks Ken. I try and keep editing down to the absolute minimum so have not attempted to sort out light levels which is why a part is "blown". My trouble is if I play about too much with an image it ends up completely different from the original.

bazza

Nice shot Barry, good detail

Not quite sure what all this is about really as the only thing that was said was that the eye area is a little dark.

Unfortunately for you the light was just not right for this shot, and there is little you can do about it. The neck is completely blown because the sun was behind and to the left which has resulted in the shadow on the cat's face and as you do not want to use post processing to recover the detail you are stuck with it.

If you have shot in RAW you may be able to get some of the detail back by adjusting the exposure and using some fill light.

Lovely animal though!

Heather

Welcome heather to the group and thank you for your comments

Due to the type of photography I do shooting in Raw is not really an option ,the continuous frame rate is too slow using my Nikon D300. Shooting in Jpeg gives me up to 8fps so I can get shots like this.



For studio/ portrait type shots where detail is critical then yes RAW every time when you can get everything set up perfectly and in this respect you are perfectly correct. When shooting wildlife be it in an enclosed environment or out in the country you don't have that luxury and to compromise, in this case fps against single shot.

Also trying to shoot RAW with continuous shooting means that a lot of large files being transferred to a memory card could in some cirumstances cause a "stall" . I found this out when first doing digital photography with my first DSLR Nikon D70s, so I tend to use 60MB/s CF cards for my present Nikon D300 and 95MB/s when working with my digital camcorder.
Transfer read/write speeds are so often overlooked when buying memory cards as people tend to look at the GB size instead

As for the rest of my previous post I was trying to point out the necessity for having good equipment to view photos with. Without it, like I was using previously, you can never ever produce the best results especially when doing your own printing.

Bazza